by Tina Turner
If “River Deep—Mountain High” introduced me to the way I wanted to sing, our first trip to Europe showed me exactly how I wanted to live. In 1966, London was the center of the universe, the place where everything went “Pop!” and the home of “mods and rockers” and Carnaby Street. At times, I felt that I was in the middle of a fairy tale. I loved the double-decker buses, the little black cabs, and the pretty white town houses that lined the streets. We stayed at the Norfolk Hotel near the Cromwell Road, and every morning at 6 a.m. we were awakened by the sound of horses clomping their way to the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. The show got out so late that Wimpy’s, the English version of McDonald’s, was the only place open, but somehow it seemed more colorful than our fast-food places at home. Even the hamburgers were charming in London, although when we tried to order iced tea the Brits thought we were crazy. “You want hot tea and then you want ice in it? That’s an American for you,” they said dismissively.
For a girl coming from Nutbush and St. Louis, it was like being transported to another world. I felt an immediate connection with the city and its people, like love at first sight. Then, even then, I didn’t want to go back to America. I wanted to stay! I felt the same way when I saw France and Germany for the first time. Somehow, these faraway places seemed like home, and maybe they were in another life. I’m a big believer in reincarnation.
Playing the Royal Albert Hall with the Stones was both thrilling and terrifying, given that the room held over five thousand seats and was completely packed because everyone wanted to see the Rolling Stones. We’d never performed for such a big audience. Ike looked out from behind the curtain and said, “I want Ike and Tina, just Ike and Tina, to fill this place,” which sounded like a pipe dream. We were a little nervous, but needlessly so. The crowd loved us, and so did the Stones. We blew them away with our dancing. Mick said that we raised the temperature of the room, really got the audience going, so by the time the Stones came out, they felt like they had to work harder to top us. That’s a true collaboration, when the opening act and the lead band play off each other and create a new energy.
As usual, “Cinderella” had a hundred responsibilities, so I spent most of my time backstage at the Albert Hall, prepping for our performance. When I finally saw Mick Jagger for the first time, he was standing in the wings, and what I noticed about him was that he had the whitest face. Later, he showed up at the dressing room I shared with the Ikettes and said in his unmistakable voice, “I like how you girls dance.” We’d seen him strutting with his tambourine onstage, and he was a little awkward back then. We thought it was kind of cute that he admired our dancing, so we pulled him into our group and taught him how to do the Pony. Mick caught on fast, but he found it difficult to do certain steps. That didn’t keep him from trying, and when we watched him doing a little bit of it during his next show we thought, Well, that’s good. Not that he ever gave me and the girls credit for his fancy new footwork. To this day, Mick likes to say, “My mother taught me how to dance.” And I say, “Okay. That’s fine.” But I know better.
While we were in England, I went to see a psychic, which was the beginning of a lifelong passion for me. I’m always looking for guidance. At the end of that first reading, the psychic told me something I’d never expected to hear. She said, “You will be among the biggest of stars. A partner of yours will fall, like a leaf from a tree in autumn, but you will survive and go on.” I didn’t believe it was possible that there could be a Tina without Ike. Still, I tucked the idea in the back of my mind and thought about it when times were rough. And they were getting rougher every day.
Living with Ike was a high-wire act. I had to tread carefully, watching what I said, or how I looked at him. He was always on edge, ready to fight like he was a dog; once you unchained him, he’d jump on anything, just to fight. I had no other place to go and no money of my own, not even a five-dollar allowance. When I wanted cash, I was reduced to sneaking a few bills from the roll Ike kept in his wallet. If he was in a good mood, he’d arrange for me to go shopping, but that was because, in his mind, when other people thought I looked good, it made him look good. In a perverse way, the bruises he gave me—the black eye, the busted lip or rib, the swollen nose—were markings, a sign of ownership, another way of Ike saying, “She’s mine and I can do whatever I want with her.”
I knew it was time to leave, but I didn’t know how to take the first step. The one time I tried to run away, I failed miserably. I had nowhere to go so I boarded a bus to St. Louis to see Muh. It didn’t take Ike very long to figure out where I was headed, and he caught up with me at a bus stop on the way and ordered me to come back. That didn’t go well. At my lowest, I convinced myself that death was my only way out. And I was fine with going because I just didn’t see the point of living that life any longer. I actually tried to kill myself. Why did I snap on an ordinary day in 1968? For starters, there were three women at the house at the time, and Ike was having sex with all of them. Three of us were named Ann. You can’t make stuff like that up. He only had to remember one name.
One of the “Anns,” Ann Thomas, was pregnant with his child, another insult to me. I felt so bad that I was surrounded by all of those women. I knew they were Ike’s girlfriends—everyone knew—but there was nothing I could do about it. Even Rhonda, our biggest fan and a vital part of the Ike and Tina Turner operation, had an obligatory affair with Ike, one that she came to regret. He seduced every woman in our circle. That’s what he did. In his mind, sex was power. When a woman became his conquest, he believed he owned her.
To be honest, sometimes his girlfriends, like Rhonda, became my closest friends because, in a funny way, we were in the same boat, dependent on Ike, constantly at his beck and call, ruled by him, abused by him. We were like members of a cult. What do you call them? Sisterwives?
But wasn’t I supposed to be the real wife? A little more elevated than the others? It was just the opposite. Ike actually treated me worse than his girlfriends. I was just a singer: someone to use and sweep under the rug. Everything was diminishing—my status, my confidence, my world. I was growing older, maybe more introspective, and out of my unhappiness came thoughts of suicide, so I hatched a plan. I went to my doctor and told him I was having trouble sleeping. I might have even said that Ike was the one who needed sleeping pills. He was a good doctor—he warned me that the pills were dangerous, that I shouldn’t take too many. I pretended to listen, then went home and put them away, ready for whenever I decided I’d had enough.
For no particular reason, this turned out to be the night I’d had enough. I wasn’t thinking about the kids—I wasn’t thinking at all. It felt like something I had to do. Right after dinner, I took the pills, all fifty of them, which is not an easy thing to do. I knew they would take time to work, in fact I was counting on it. If I could just make it to the stage for our opening number, Ike would still get paid for the booking. That’s how our contract worked. If I got sick before the show started, it was considered a cancellation and there would be no money. I was so well trained that even my suicide had to be convenient for Ike. I managed to get to the club where we were performing, a place called the Apartment, and started to put on my makeup, struggling to appear normal.
The Ikettes were running around, fussing with their wigs and dresses, the usual preshow rush of activity—when someone noticed I wasn’t right. I had drawn a line across my face with my eyebrow pencil and I was having trouble speaking. Panicked, they ran for Rhonda, who took one look at me and called Ike to come right away.
I don’t remember any of this, but I’m told that Rhonda and Ike threw me into the car and rushed me to the nearest hospital. If there’s a crisis, Rhonda’s the person you want at the wheel. She’s fearless and has nerves of steel, which she needed that night because they had to take me to several hospitals before they found one with an emergency room. Rhonda was speeding through stop signs and running red lights the whole way, certain they were going to lose me. Meanwhile, Ike was
in the back, trying to wake me up. He was so desperate that he stuck his finger down my throat to force me to throw up. I can imagine what was going through his mind, Don’t let her die, don’t let her die, thinking of the money I pulled in, something he would never admit to me.
At Daniel Freeman Hospital, the emergency room doctors took over. They pumped my stomach, but couldn’t get me to respond. I was still out cold. Ike asked, “Can I talk to her?” At that point, they were willing to try anything. He moved close to me, probably doing his best imitation of a concerned husband, and started speaking. My subconscious mind heard him—a familiar voice, something I woke up with, slept with, lived with, the voice of my tormentor, a hell voice, cursing me softly. Of course, he got through. Immediately, my heart started racing.
They said, “Keep talking. We have a pulse.”
The next thing I remember, I woke up and was trying to figure out why I was in a hospital bed. The nurse came in and said, “Hello, can you tell me your name?”
“I’m Tina Turner,” I slurred.
“Oh, can you sing?” she asked.
“Yeah, I can sing,” and I belted, “When I was a little girl . . . ,” the opening line from “River Deep—Mountain High.” Interesting that even when I was semiconscious, I made the decision not to sing one of Ike’s songs.
I fell asleep again. The next day, I woke up, turned my head, and looked right into the face of Ike.
“You should die, you motherfucker,” he said.
My first thought was, I didn’t escape this. I looked at him and said, “Oh no.” Then I looked away. He knew that I had taken the pills because of him, and that was it. He came to visit just the one time and didn’t come back. Didn’t even care. The only thing he cared about was the show. As soon as I was released from the hospital, he forced me to go back to work. That night, I was weak and had terrible stomach cramps, yet I had to get onstage and sing and dance—had to go through the whole show with energy and a smile on my face.
When we finished, the Ikettes held me up and helped me to the dressing room. There was Ike, fuming.
“You should die, motherfucker,” he said again. “But if you die,” he added, “you know what you would do to me.”
It didn’t make sense, him telling me that I should die, but if I did, it would be bad for him. But nothing made sense in those days. Ike was on an ego trip of “I, me, mine.” It was always about him. Always.
As terrible as the experience was—and I felt sick for a long time—I learned something. My suicide attempt wasn’t a classic cry for attention, or help. When I took those pills, I chose death, and I chose it honestly. I was unhappy when I woke up. But I never tried it again because I made an important realization, one that changed the course of my life. I came out of the darkness believing that I was meant to survive. I was here for a reason.
I knew now that there was only one way out of this nightmare, and it was through the door.
5
* * *
“A CHANGE IS GONNA COME”
“There have been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long
But now I think I’m able to carry on”
In describing my life, a journalist once said that my experiences with Ike were “Dantesque.” I probably didn’t understand it at the time, but now that I’ve actually read Dante, I know what he meant: I went through Hell, literally. In The Divine Comedy, Dante travels through Hell and Purgatory before finally reaching Paradise. There’s a lot of poetry along the way, but the basic journey is one from pain to peace, from darkness to enlightenment. Ike lived in a world of darkness, and he tried to hold me prisoner there with him. It worked for a long time, but after my suicide attempt, something shifted. I spent the first seven years of my marriage wondering what I had gotten into, and the last seven trying to figure how to get out.
There were many levels of Hell, and I experienced them every day. For example, Ike never had any patience for illness. In 1969, after another tour with the Rolling Stones, I was so sick that I could barely hold up my head. I had to drive myself to the doctor, and to my horror, the only car available was Ike’s limousine. I wasn’t a good driver in a regular car, but a limousine? Somehow, I made it to the appointment, and the doctor took one look at me and said, “You’re going to the hospital right from here.” So I had to get back behind the wheel of that thing and drive to the ER. It turned out that I had TB. Ike was upset—not because I was sick, of course, but because I couldn’t work and he had to cancel our upcoming dates. The Rolling Stones sweetly sent me flowers, but Ike didn’t. I was in a hospital bed for several weeks, slowly recovering, and it never even occurred to him to visit me.
It gets worse.
While I was recuperating, Ike had the crazy idea to redecorate the house, with disastrous results. When we’d first moved into that house on Olympiad Drive, it was furnished with sensible pieces from the previous family. Nothing exciting, but the décor was simple and comfortable. Then Ike got his hands on the place when I wasn’t looking and turned it into a hipster whorehouse.
Anyone who knows me understands that my surroundings are very important to me. My friends and I joke that I must have been an interior designer in another life. I want to live in an atmosphere of beauty and harmony, with candles, flowers, and classic furniture. I know exactly how I want a room to look, and I know how to bring that vision to life. I remember when I was a child living in a back room no bigger than a closet at my cousin’s house in Tennessee. The space was ice-cold in the winter and hot and airless in the summer, yet I still took the time to dress it up with a proper bedspread and objects I considered treasures, because I wanted it to be nice.
Ike never let me express myself the whole time we were married. After I left him, I decorated my homes in England, Germany, France, and Switzerland, and each one had a beauty and personality all its own. I believe my sense of style comes naturally to me and is an extension of who I am. Unfortunately, Ike’s style was an extension of who he was—a vulgar man with no taste—and I had to live with it.
Where did he even find such awful furniture? I wondered. The sofas had ugly metal prongs that looked suspiciously like spiky penises. The coffee table was shaped like an oversized guitar, while the television cabinet was supposed to look like a giant snail, or a whale, or something. The colors were garish, with swaths of red and gold everywhere. The bedroom was something that belonged in Las Vegas, with a mirror over the bed and curtains around it. The kitchen had green-and-white tiles that couldn’t be cleaned easily—it took half a day to scrub that floor, and guess who ended up doing it? Bob Krasnow, a music producer, came to the house one day and was surprised to find me, the star of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, with a scarf wrapped around my head, on my knees scrubbing. So much for the glamorous life of Tina Turner! Bob had a wicked sense of humor and wasn’t afraid of offending Ike. “You mean you can actually spend seventy thousand dollars at Woolworth’s?” was his assessment of Ike’s dubious decorating talent.
Whenever I tried to improve the house, Ike got angry. I think he was so insecure about his taste and his choices (a throwback to his lack of education) that he lashed out at anyone who challenged him. If he noticed something was different, I would almost get trampled to the ground and he’d insist that I put it back exactly the way it was. One day, I tried changing the towels in the bathroom, and oh, he really cursed me out. “Get those fucking towels out of there and put back the ones that were here before,” he yelled. This was over towels. There was no freedom to do anything. In his mind, I existed just to please him. The whole time I lived there we called it “the house”—we never called it “home.” But it was the only home I had.
Success should have made things better. Ike and Tina were in demand, and we performed throughout the U.S., including at Madison Square Garden, and appeared on popular television shows such as The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and The Andy Williams Show. But Ike was just as controlling and abusive onstage as he was at the house. He forced me to sing �
�I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” in such a cheap and sexual way that it became my least favorite song. I was embarrassed by the gestures I had to make at the microphone. If I did something he didn’t want me to do, I’d hear about it, something as innocent as looking back at him while we were performing. If I did that, he’d say, “Turn around, motherfucker.” I was practically in a trance, on automatic pilot, always thinking, Ike is watching—you’d better just dance and sing.
The first time I got a standing ovation, I didn’t know what to do. We were in Paris in 1971. It was a really good show that night and the Parisians went crazy. They were standing up at their seats, clapping and calling for me. I asked Ike, “Can I go back onstage?” His anger was such that I had to make sure I didn’t do anything that would get me a licking. I waited until he gave me permission. Even then, I was so overwhelmed by the applause, and so unaccustomed to the approval, that I said to the audience, “Do you mean it?” It was gratifying to hear them yell, “Yeah!” I was so thrilled that they liked me.
1971 was also the year that “Proud Mary” became a hit, and with its success, life took a downward turn. I heard the Creedence Clearwater Revival song by John Fogerty and suggested doing our own version. Ike and I played around with it for a while—we did that with new material—but I didn’t know if, or when, we would actually do it onstage. Ike kept those decisions to himself. One night, when we were performing in Oakland, Ike started strumming the opening chords. I recognized the song, of course, but I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t even certain if I remembered the words, so I started talking to buy a little time. “Every now and then I think you might like to hear something from us that’s nice and easy,” I improvised. “Every now and then” was an expression I used all the time (I still do). And then I added, “But there’s just one thing. You see, we never ever do nothing nice and easy. We always do it nice . . . and rough.” There was a bit of truth in my words because we always did everything so fast. Ike was still strumming, and then the words came back to me and I drifted into the slow version of the song, “And we’re rolling, rolling, rolling on a river.” People went crazy.
